Torture
by Idril Telperien
Summary: Small piece of drabble about Fran Morgan trying to come to terms with finding out what Buford did to her son.


**A little bit of angsty rubbish I wrote at Christmas of all time, was actually having a pretty good day so don't know where it came from :p Anyway please review because they make me happy :) **

**I obviously don't own any of the characters, I'm just borrowing them for some well-deserved torture :P **

**/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\**

**Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.****  
><strong>**Christopher Morley ****  
><strong>**  
><strong>She should have known. Her son was being abused by a man that she had trusted. She'd sat there and told his friends how Carl Buford had saved her son. _Saved. _The irony was unbelievable. He'd been murdering her son, stealing his innocence. All those times when he'd rushed into his room, she'd put it down to him being a teenager. How could a Mother not know that one of her baby's was being hurt? She'd prided herself on being a good mother; all her children had been clothed, fed and loved. What mattered, what _really _mattered, was that her children should have been protected from all the bad things out there. The monsters in the closet. She'd been so busy trying to protect them from the metaphorical monsters that she'd allowed the real monsters to walk happily through the front door.

She could remember vividly Derek coming home from football practice one night and saying he'd had enough, he was quitting. She thought he had just had a difficult practice. He'd lost. He _had _lost, he'd been losing his innocence in a grotty changing room. _God_. That image made her sick to her stomach. Her baby boy. Looking back it had been a cry for help, if only she'd pushed that little bit harder, he could have told her, she could have saved him. Instead she'd told him to go back and not give up so easily. She wanted him to have something better than she'd had; all she'd thought about was his football scholarship. She saw it as a way out, so she pushed him to go back. She could remember the words; _"Whatever it takes, baby. I know its hard work but it will all be worth it when you've got a good job." _ She was trying to be a good Mom. Instead she'd pushed him back to Buford. She wished she could have five minutes alone with that man. How she'd make him suffer. Make him wish he'd never laid a finger on her precious boy.

Derek kept telling her that it wasn't her fault. He kept hugging her with his strong arms and kissing her head. It didn't make her smile the way it used to. Instead it made her sick to think he could still stand to look at her when she'd let him down so badly.

What made it even worse was that he was never going to pay for his crimes against her son. Many other children would get some kind of vindication, but for Derek there was nothing. It was as if nothing had happened. He said that was what he wanted, he wanted to forget. They both knew that was ridiculous. He would never forget. Every second, for the rest of his life he would _know. _He would know what that bastard did to him. He would know his Mother had stood by and watched him drown.

A few days after Damien's funeral she'd gone to lay flowers, her eyes floating over to "_the lost boys"_ grave stone. How easy that could have been her son buried under six feet of Earth. She could remember the look on Damien's Mother's face; it was more than heartbroken, it was as if the world had stopped. Her world had. She could remember the day her husband had died, the unimaginable grief of realising the one you loved would never again walk through the door. But she'd still had her children; the three of them had kept her going. Little stars that shone in her darkest hour. No parent should ever have to bury their child. She couldn't envisage the horror and torment that would come from losing her babies. That was why she worried about Derek so much, her husband had died doing his duty, and now Derek was out doing his. The sense of déjà vu was almost too much to bear. If she lost him…

But she had. Her innocent little boy had died the moment she'd let him onto that football team.


End file.
